9 - Adolf Busch Discusses Ways of Musical Progress

Summary

This article, ‘Adolf Busch Discusses Ways of Musical Progress’, was published on the educational page of Musical America in 1940 ‘as told to Robert Sabin’. In other words, Busch gave Sabin an interview from which the article was compiled. It may be inferred that Busch spoke in German and that the translation was Sabin’s. As the piece deals with a number of topics which were important to Busch, it is here reprinted in full.

A musician like myself can speak most effectively about music and musicmaking to his students and friends. In discussing specific things in music itself, one feels a certain accomplishment, but it is not easy to address oneself to a more general public. Interviews and articles about music and musical education have a tendency to become negative, although that is utterly foreign to the speaker's intentions. It is very easy to take the good things for granted, and to speak almost exclusively of those conditions with which one is dissatisfied. For this reason I have always been reluctant to have statements published which might very easily misrepresent my true attitude.

There are limitless possibilities for musical development in America, and it must be exciting to every musician to observe the musical life of this land and to mark those elements in it which he feels will lead to the most good. With its unrivalled orchestras, its resources and good will there is every reason to believe that the best and truest in music will continue to thrive here. The past has shown that people always desire what is authentic in music as soon as they have been familiarized with it. America has inherited the great musical traditions of Europe as a part of her own active musical life. And we can see here developments parallel to those in the older countries.

Chamber Music Public Growing

To take a specific example, one in which I am deeply interested, there is a heartening growth in the interest of the public in chamber music. In a certain sense, the status of chamber music in a country is a measuring rod of its musical intelligence, for in chamber music we find the art in one of its purest forms. In former days my quartet used to tour throughout Germany and other countries, visiting scores of cities, large and small.